The media portray San Bernardino shooters Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29, as Muslim terrorists. We are told Farook had returned “radicalized” from a recent trip to Saudi Arabia, and that his wife Malik somehow managed to leave a message on the Facebook page of an ISIS group right before the couple killed 14 people and wounded 17 in a conference room of Inland Regional Center on December 2, 2015.
According to New York Daily News, head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office David Bowdich said that Malik issued a pledge of allegiance to ISIS on Facebook at about 11 a.m., roughly the same time the couple began shooting. Malik allegedly used an alias to direct her laudatory message to Islamic State kingpin Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Facebook took down her post to cooperate with law enforcement, which means we won’t be able to verify Malik’s posting for ourselves.
Nor would we find any trace of the couple on the Internet because according to law enforcement investigators, Farook and Malik began erasing their digital footprint a day in advance of the deadly attack, deleting email accounts, disposing of hard drives and smashing their cellphones. (Washington Times)
After they initially had fled Inland Regional Center, the couple inexplicably were returning to the crime scene when they were killed in a police shootout, leaving behind them their 6-month-old baby daughter.
However, the head of the FBI now says there is no evidence Farook and Malik were part of an Islamic terrorist cell, and that investigators believe the two merely were “inspired” but not directed by Islamic State.
Joseph Ax reports for Reuters that at a counterterrorism conference in New York on December 16, 2015, FBI Director James Comey said that while Farook and Malik had expressed support for “jihad and martyrdom” in private communications as early as 2013, they never did so publicly on social media.
Nevertheless, Comey insists that “Your parents’ al Qaeda was a very different model than the threat we face today,” and that Islamic State has “revolutionized” terrorism by seeking to “inspire” small-scale attacks by using social media, encrypted communications and slickly produced propaganda to recruit followers around the world. Comey said that like Farook and Malik, Mohammed Abdulazeez, the suspect in July’s fatal shooting of four U.S. Marines and a Navy sailor in Chattanooga, Tennessee, similarly was “inspired” by Islamic State.
Comey said the FBI currently has “hundreds” of investigations in all 50 U.S. states involving potential Islamic State-inspired plots.
Comey said Islamic State has a three-pronged strategy: recruit fighters to join it in the Middle East, inspire individuals in other countries to carry out attacks, and send out trained operatives to commit violence in Europe and the United States. The group has perfected the use of social media, and Twitter in particular, to contact potential followers “as a way to crowd source terrorism – to sell murder.” Islamic State also frequently employs encrypted communications,and renewed his calls for technology companies to avoid creating devices and services that cannot be accessed, even with a proper court order. But Comey said he is convinced that law enforcement and tech companies can work together without compromising personal privacy — “We are not going to break the Internet.”
The inconsistency between media accounts and what the FBI now says about Farook and Malik’s sympathies for Islamic State is only one of many inconsistencies about the San Bernardino mass shooting. Another one has to do with the number of alleged shooters.
Sally Abdelmageed works at the Inland Regional Center and saw the shooters enter the building. Shortly after the shooting, Abdelmageed told CBS News’ Scott Pelley that she had seen three white men dressed in military clothes, “We saw three men dressed in all black military attire, with vests on, holding assault rifles, and they opened up the doors to building 3 and one of them starts to spray and shoot all over the room.”
When asked to provide more detail about the shooters she said, “I couldn’t see a face, he had a black hat on, from my view all i could see was a black hat. A black long sleeve shirt, possibly gloves on, he had black cargo pants, the kinds with zippers and big puffy pockets. He had a huge assault rifle and extra ammo. I just saw three.”
When Pelley asked, “You’re certain you saw three men?,” Abdelmageed said, “Yes, it looked like their skin color was white. They looked like they were athletic and they appeared to be tall.”
Abdelmageed’s account matches the original report from Southern California’s Fox 11, which tweeted that police were searching for “3 white males dressed in military gear.” Another eyewitness also expressed doubt that Farook was the culprit.
But David Chelsey, the lawyer who represents Farook’s family, told the media that Malik weighed 90 pounds and that she would have been unable to carry assault rifles and tactical gear. Chelsey said, “There is a lot of disconnects and there is a lot of unknowns and there is a lot things that quite frankly don’t add up or seem implausible. It just doesn’t make sense for these two to act like some kind of Bonnie and Clyde or something.”
Tashfeen Malik & Syed Farook
H/t Anti-Media
~Eowyn
